1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an electronic mail creating apparatus and method suitably applied to a portable terminal and an information processing device.
2. Description of the Related Art
On a cellular phone which is a typical portable terminal, not only an essential call function but also a function to transmit/receive an electronic mail (hereinafter referred to as e-mail) (so-called a mailer function) are provided. Transmission/reception of e-mails using the cellular phone has been widely spread among a large number of users. Accompanied with the proliferation of the mailer function, the users want to send a unique and amusing e-mail.
Accordingly, in recent years, a mailer function capable of not only transmitting/receiving a message (a character string) but also transmitting/receiving a message to which image data is added has been proposed (See pages 3 and 4 and FIGS. 1 to 3 in Japanese Patent Laid-Open 2001-306467).
However, in the conventional mailer function, in order to transmit an image together with the created message, users have to perform operations including an operation for selecting objective image data and an operation for attaching the selected image data to the message. Therefore, there has been a problem that these operations are complicated for the users and the usability is not good. In particular, this problem becomes worse in a portable terminal such as a cellular phone in which an enter operation is restricted because of the poor operability of its manipulation device due to a small size of its case.
Accordingly, in creating an e-mail message, there is a need for simpler input operations to enter letters and contents (image data, music data and the like).
In general, with respect to the mailer function in the portable terminal, an upper-limit data size (the maximum capacity) of a message, with which the message can be transmitted, is determined for each server relaying the message or for each mail transmission/reception service signed up. Therefore, if the user creates a message without concern for such maximum capacity, then it may be impossible for the user to transmit the message because of the capacity of the message being too large for transmission. In this case, the users are Obliged to perform troublesome operations in order to make the data size of the message fit within the maximum capacity range for transmission, by arranging the way to express the messages or by simply abbreviating it.